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Thursday, October 31, 2013

By "Stella", I mean Ely (myself) ... and by "groove", I mean the Internet! We are moved into the house and signed up for the Verizon Home Fusion thing. I don't want to blame the Verizon setup because I may or may not have messed with settings ... anyway... the system kept crashing at the same time every day for about 20 - 25 minutes, which doesn't work because I work from home. So I had to use my phone as a hotspot until it went back up. Again, not sure if that was my fault or the system's. And then Verizon doesn't have unlimited data, so we were on the 10 gigabyte plan, which turns out is not a whole heck of a lot. I actually drove to Panera to sit in their parking lot to use Internet because I was afraid I was going to use up all of ours and have to pay extra for me to have Internet to work.

So, we decided that the stress of it was not worth it. We were still within the 14 day grace period, so we called them up and cancelled and installed a local Internet service instead. It's a bit slower, but honestly I can't tell much of a difference yet. I don't upload/download all that often besides pictures so it hasn't been an issue. And now I get to use as much Internet as I want. Plus, it's about $5 cheaper. Win-win. : )

So now that I have Internet again, I can start catching you up on what we've been up to.

Last photo of Gus at our apartment.

1. We are doing another Whole30. We are on Day 3 today. So far so good.
2. We tore down walls in the bedroom and are now working on building them back up.
3. We have hired a guy to put in a new heating system, due any day now.
4. We have moved about 3/4 of our things into the house. Waiting on the furnace before going all in.
5. We have someone coming to inspect our crawl space on Saturday to get that moisture blocked.
6. We are still searching for a subleaser for our apartment.
7. We gave Gus his own little window seat, even if it is a little wobbly. We'll fix it eventually.
8. We met the neighbors!
9. I tried installing 2 things. I broke the first one and was successful with the second.
10. I LOVE our new house. I have so many ideas for it. And I can't wait to share them all with you!

So that's what we've been up to. In a nutshell. I will elaborate in the days to come. It's amazing how we were only limited on Internet for a few weeks but I still feel like I have to be conservative. Same thing happens when I use Hubby's computer for an hour. He has a Mac and I have a PC and I always, always, always end up trying to do the two finger scroll on my computer when I'm done. Ah well.

Ok, that's the update for now. I'll work on posts to explain in detail those 10 things ... and I'll have pictures! : )

Friday, October 18, 2013

I have been obsessed with blogs like Young House Love and Bower Power for a while now. I may have even gone back and read the entire Bower Power archive from start to finish in the weeks leading up to us buying our house. I am fairly OCD sometimes, lol. I don't regret it though. I learned a lot and fell in love with their adorable family.

So I'm excited to post our own before/after photos of our house as we get to redecorating and all of that fun stuff!

So far we haven't done too terribly much because we've been working on moving our things over to the house from the apartment, making lists of everything we need to do, comparing options, and getting quotes.

But we did manage to tear down the walls in our bedroom. Before we did anything, it was only half done. The seller had put up some drywall on half of it, but the rest was lathe and plaster. There were a couple of holes and broken pieces and horrible wallpaper. In the picture below you can see the side with the drywall.

The other half of the room, which I never got a picture of, had ugly green/blue flowery wallpaper with streaks in it. I did get a picture of it from when that brick column started peeling though. It looked a little more blue than it does in this picture below.

We decided that the walls couldn't be salvaged, so we started ripping them away. That actually was more fun that I thought it would be. And a good workout too! I'm still sore from the tear down and then trying to shovel all of the plaster out of the truck at the dump.

We'd had weeks of frustration and anxiety waiting to find out if we were going to get the house, so I like to say that was my release. We also took off the drywall because there was a little moisture damage, so we'll be replacing that.

The view from the other side. We're hoping to get rid of that ceiling fan too and replace it with something a little more up to date.

So we have a whole list of things we want to do (eventually) in this room. Some will be sooner than others. And since I love a good list, I'll share it with you.

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

I've disappeared again. Sorry about that. But we've had a lot going on. A lot, a lot.

We ended up changing our closing date. Again. For the 5th time. We got to the eve of closing and realized they had put us down for the wrong downpayment %, so we changed it, and in doing so had to wait a week for a new closing date.

So finally, on Thursday, we got the green light, and were able to close. We didn't actually look to see where the building was, so we parked way down and almost had to run to get there on time. And then we had to take an elevator (which I don't handle very well) so I had to sit down when we got off because my head was spinning. But that passed after a few minutes.

We got there just a minute or two late, but had time to sit down for a minute before the title agent came in to get us.

Ok, so we'd never been through this process before, and I had heard to expect to sign a ton of papers. But holy geez! I'm sure my eyes bulged out of my head when I saw the two inches of paperwork that we had to either sign or initial. I wish I was exaggerating. I would say that home buying in itself is responsible for half of deforestation! I'm surprised my hand didn't cramp up.

So signing the paperwork took about an hour, and the guy didn't even really explain each paper in detail, just a quick summary of what it was we were signing. We got to talk to the seller afterward and ask some questions and everything. That was really helpful. And then he gave us our keys! It was so hard to leave them lying on the table where he had put them, but I wanted to at least appear calm and normal when inside I was dying to grab them and do a happy dance, lol.

So, an hour later, we were walking out of the title agency and back to our car so we could drive to the house and soak it all in. That's about all that we did too, soak it in and make plans. It was late by then and I had to work the next day, so we locked up and went back to our apartment.

Gift from the seller.

The next day, Friday, Hubby was off of work so he went out and ran a few errands while I worked half a day. And when I got off work my mom, mother-in-law, and a friend showed up to help us start moving things. We got everything but the big stuff (couch, bed, cabinet, etc.) moved that day, so it was a big day. On Saturday my mom was replaced by my brother and we still had my mother-in-law and then 2 friends helping us, so we moved all of the big stuff in.

Now we have just the things that we need to live off of during the week until we get Internet hooked up and we can fully move to the house. We've been keeping busy over there with some big changes, so hopefully tomorrow I can post about that. I will say that it was a ton of fun removing some ugly blue wallpaper! : )

That's probably long enough for now. I'll try not to be gone so long next time! Hope you all are having a good week!

Tuesday, October 1, 2013

This weekend went by in a blur! It seems like we were either so busy we didn't have a spare second or we were complete bums trying to figure out what to do in the meantime. No middle ground. Does that make sense?

Well, we decided to check out Iron Man 3 and World War Z on Friday night. We actually only watched Iron Man 3 and then decided to get some rest because we were helping with an event the next morning pretty early. I was expecting it to be not as great as the other two, just because movies sometimes spiral downward the more sequels they make. I was surprised though. It was really, really good. **Slight spoiler** I was wondering if it would make reference to the Avengers happening, and actually was expecting it to completely ignore that whole thing, but again was surprised because they did bring it up. So before I give away much more of the movie, I just want to say that it was really good and we will be adding it to our collection.

I will probably be adding World War Z to our collection as well. I had issues the night that we watched it, which weren't helped by Hubby chattering his teeth and screeching horribly. You will understand why when you watch the movie. I had just gotten done telling him we can't watch scary movies when we get in our new house because I get creeped out easily ... so what does he do? He starts making creepy noises from the film. Thoughtful one, that boy, lol. I survived the night though. I'm sure you are all happy to hear that! : )

Anywho, didn't really mean to talk about movies in this post, just wanted to share that they were both excellent in my former-horror-movie-lovin'-now-action-junkie self's opinion! : )

Ok, so Saturday morning there was an event. It was the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure. I mentioned before that Hubby and I are amateur radio operators. Our local ham radio club got together with the race committee and we volunteered to be the communications at the different stations to any and all that we could so things would run smoothly.

I've mentioned before that I am shy. And I also have a huge phobia of talking on phone type instruments. This includes radios. Which is why I have only ever done it a handful of times ... under pressure. So for this event I was going to be in a strange place, with strange people, in charge of communications for that area, and I would have to do it on one of the things I hate most. I had a bit of an anxiety attack the night before. There were a few tears and some deep breathing and pep talks ... to myself. I was too embarrassed to let Hubby know and I knew it would make him feel bad ... plus more attention just leads to more crying, lol. So I talked myself up and decided that I could do it.

All in all, I had to talk on the radio maybe 4 or 5 times for about 10 seconds each. So it ended up not being a big deal. And I knew it wouldn't, but the anticipation of the unknown is what gets to me. I need to work on that, but you know what they say you have to do to get over it? Do the thing that you fear over and over and over ... and over ... again until you no longer fear it. Or at least until you aren't held back by your fear. I have tried that, but honestly I don't really have much of a desire to conquer that fear. I make phone calls when I have to. It's not often. So I'm ok being a hermit, lol.

The race turned out to be a great success. Nobody got hurt except one man who had a bit of a diabetic episode, but his wife was totally on top of the situation and it worked out fine. We had a ton of participants in the race and I got some pretty awesome pictures including a guy that spray painted his leg hair and a ton of people (men, women, & kiddos) in pink tutus! And in the end I was proud of myself and happy that I could participate in such a wonderful event.

Well, this post took a totally different direction than I was expecting, but there's a bit more about me that I'm sure you wanted to know.

1) I am afraid of zombies
2) I am afraid of the dark, especially while thinking about zombies
3) I am afraid of talking on the phone, even to most family
4) I suffer from voluntary hermitism : )

I definitely have many more fears that I could add to that list, but I will spare you. That is only half of our weekend, but I'll save the rest for another post. Until then, happy Tuesday! : )